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It’s long been said that Pixar movies — the good ones, at least — are as made for parents as they are for their kids, but that bit of received wisdom has always been especially true of the “Toy Story” franchise, for the basic reason that those films are about the parents, and to an even greater degree than “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” More specifically, they’re about the bittersweet sorrow of parenting, which the best of them articulate with a bluntness absent from so much “adult” fiction on the subject.
Sure, Andy’s mom was an incidental figure, and his dad simply didn’t exist, but the attachment and responsibility that Buzz and Woody feel towards their children is impossible to mistake. The same goes for the toys’ inevitable heartbreak, best articulated by the crushing pangs of nostalgia that ginger rag doll Jessie suffers whenever she thinks about the precious little girl who first outgrew her. If this series and its deathless plastic heroes cling to friendship as their prevailing theme, that’s only because it, like them, can last forever without changing. It’s because friendship is the only form of love that’s liable to stay right where you played with it last.
The genius of Andrew Stanton’s “Toy Story 5,” which for all its flaws proves sharper than any of these movies have been since the late ’90s, is that it recognizes how tech poses an unprecedented danger to the nature of play itself — how it threatens to make kids grow up even faster than they already did, while also gamifying the act of friendship into something that requires constant screen time in order to survive. That starts with the film’s backboard-shatteringly obvious slam-dunk of a premise, which credibly feels like it inspired the idea to make another sequel rather than the other way around: Bonnie gets an iPad. (“Extinction! Not again!,” Rex the dinosaur bemoans).
Remember Bonnie, the adorable five-year-old who inherited Andy’s old toys and, in a stroke of brilliance, invented one of her own by gluing a pair of googly eyes onto a cheap white spork? Well, now she’s grown into a very shy eight-year-old whose struggle to make friends has grown exponentially harder since every kid in her Berkeley-coded neighborhood has gotten addicted to the same device. It’s called a Lilypad (the signature model resembles a frog, with two blinking LCD eyes above the screen and a pair of webbed feet below), it’s basically a starter tablet boasting simple games and social networking features, and the vibe is that Bonnie needs to have one if she has any hope of not being the biggest loser in the world. Her parents comply with the new order, powerless in the face of big tech.
To no one’s surprise, Bonnie is immediately transfixed by her Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee, whose arrogant smarm effectively threads the needle between Maya Hawke’s Anxiety and Regina George’s everything else). In part, that’s because kids lock into every screen they see like they’re tuned into Edward Nygma’s “The Box” device from “Batman Forever,” and in part that’s because the tablet’s software gamifies friendship for kids Bonnie’s age even before Instagram has gotten the chance. Playing with her toys was pure and fun — playing with the local girls on her Lilypad doesn’t seem like play at all. (Stanton and Kenna Harris’ script underlines the difference with a handful of reliably hilarious sequences that illustrate Bonnie’s imagination in a vivid, storybook style that make the rest of the film look plain by comparison).
Be that as it may, it isn’t long before Buzz, Hamm, Mr. Pricklepants, and the rest of Andy’s iconic hand-me-downs are binned in Bonnie’s garage. The only escapees are Jessie — voiced by a series-clinching Joan Cusack — and her faithful horse Bullseye, who had snuck out of the house in a bid to accompany Bonnie on an ill-fated sleepover. Of all the little girl’s toys, Jessie is uniquely sensitive to the fear of losing another kid, even if it’s a dud like Bonnie (just kidding…). After all, Jessie still catches herself looking at the address her first owner wrote on the inside flap of her chaps in case she got lost, even if she panics when a kindly old couple finds her on the side of the road and brings the ragdoll back to the farmhouse where and when somebody loved her.
Where is Woody in all of this? The drawstring cowboy may not live with Buzz and the gang anymore, but he shows up in a crisis because they’ve still got a friend in him. That the paint on the back of his head has chipped away into a bald spot is funny — that he’s inexplicably developed a beer gut is less so. Both jokes, however, reflect the extent to which the sixth “Toy Story” movie (remember “Lightyear”?) struggles to accommodate its swollen and aging cast. It’s no surprise that most of your favorite characters only get a punchline or two (toys are played with less over time, alas), and the case could be made that Woody’s superfluousness to the plot reflects his growing comfort with irrelevance, but that argument would carry more weight if this movie didn’t try so hard to return him to his former stature. Tom Hanks isn’t above a supporting role, but this franchise isn’t totally comfortable with him playing one yet.
It’s a good thing, then, that Jessie is such a capable protagonist in her own right, and that the old toys she meets on the farm give “Toy Story 5” a new sense of personality and purpose. The little girl who lives there now has outgrown a few things of her own, all of them rudimentary pieces of tech — dubbed the “AA Team” — that are as lovable as Lilypad is loathsome.
The best of the lot, without question, is a potty training device called Smarty Pants who acts drunk when he needs fresh batteries and takes potty humor to very literal new lows. Magnificently brought to life by former television star, current podcast host, and eternal American hero Conan O’Brien in one of the funniest voice performance roles in Pixar history, Smarty Pants isn’t just a bottomless fount of comic gold (O’Brien’s manic intensity is enough to make you forget this franchise is 31 years old), he’s also a sentient reminder that tech is only as shitty as the purpose assigned to it. After all, how could a parent fail to sympathize with something that people love so fiercely until the moment they throw it away?
“Toy Story 5” is often scattered to a degree that leaves even its central plot somewhat undercooked (to say nothing of its nested detours, like the silly romance between Buzz and Jessie, which needlessly diminishes the movie’s focus on friendship), which makes it ironic that Stanton and Harris’ other major coup is… adding another 30 or so characters to it in one fell swoop. I suppose it helps that all of them are next-gen Buzz Lightyears, sprung from a shipping container that gets lost at sea in the movie’s opening moments. Whatever the case, this phalanx of spacemen — organized by a single hive mind — pops in whenever the plot needs to be patched up, and their ultimate payoff is the only moment when “Toy Story 5” feels like it’s cooking with the same narrative precision on which Pixar first built its name.
At the same time, the process of Jessie navigating the pros and cons of consumer tech finds this franchise at its best. Her arc builds to a gut-punch almost as strong as the Sarah MacLachlan interlude from the series’ first sequel (even if it doesn’t hold up to the same logical scrutiny), one that hits on the need to be needed in a way that will resonate with parents of even the youngest children.
And parents are squarely in the line of fire this time around, as “Toy Story 5” is refreshingly unafraid to make them uncomfortable with our complacency in the face of an ever-changing world. There is a profound and enduring need for make-believe, Stanton’s movie argues with conviction — we first develop it as children in order to play, and we cling to it as parents in order to survive. It’s true that our kids’ love for us evolves in a much different way than our love for them, and that we’d be wise to brace ourselves for that lest it demolish us out of nowhere. But for all of its teachable wisdom, this movie knows that life is never sweeter than it is during the moments, and years, when we simply can’t accept that love is also made out of plastic.
Grade: B+
Disney will release “Toy Story 5” in theaters on Friday, June 19.
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